


speak: they're only words

by dilkirani



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Academy Era, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, also post-framework, teamengineering, thefitzwishlist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 07:02:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11984643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilkirani/pseuds/dilkirani
Summary: Written for Team Engineering's Fitz's wishlist birthday project. Prompt: “having the courage to talk to Jemma for the first time”In two parts, at the Academy and after the Framework.





	speak: they're only words

_i. then_

Fitz knows he and Jemma Simmons will get along. He can tell by the way she eagerly raises her hand in lecture, by the way she fidgets when she’s chapters (books, really) ahead of the rest of the class. By her accent, which isn’t _home_ , but it’s home-adjacent, and since he’s thousands of miles from his mum and his city, home-adjacent is more than enough. He can tell by the fact that she’s his age and has two PhDs, by the way their classmates seem to like her but don’t confide in her. She’s warm and friendly, but decidedly an odd bird, and underneath the surface she seems as lonely as he is. She has a _Doctor Who_ sticker on her notebook and a fondness for his favorite kind of tea. In the same way he knows the laws of thermodynamics and that if he takes a machine apart he’ll be able to put it back together again, he knows, without a doubt, that she could be his friend.

When she answers a question in class, he helpfully adds on. Her ideas are dazzling, and he can’t contain the excitement he feels when imagining how his work could complement hers. His suggestions only spur even wilder possibilities from her, until inevitably their professors are forced to shut down their debate and their classmates look like they’ve had front row seats to Wimbledon.

But she always packs her things into her bag before Fitz can close his book, and in the library he’s too scared to make conversation.

“Hello,” he practices in front of the mirror, when his roommate is out. “Can you believe that work Professor Vaughn assigned? It’s so easy, right?” He raises an eyebrow and immediately cringes. He was aiming for disarming but thinks he landed on lecherous instead.

“Jesus Christ, man,” his roommate groans, stumbling into the room and somehow surmising, despite his inebriated state, what Fitz had been up to. “Why do I always get stuck with the children? Do you need your mummy to come make friends for you, too?”

Fitz’s face burns bright red and he rushes out of the room. When he nearly runs over Jemma Simmons in his haste to exit the building, he thinks how in the movies, this would be the moment she notices and comforts him. Instead, it’s the moment he decides to give up, because he’s wearing pajamas with monkeys on them and his eyes are watery, and maybe that angry voice in his head, the one that’s usually drowned out by his mum’s, really was right this whole time.

The day he finds himself paired with Jemma Simmons in chem lab, he can’t find the courage to even say hi. She might be having an off-day, because she seems annoyed when she sits next to him, and she doesn’t bother making polite conversation.

The longer this goes on, the more dejected he feels. There are so many things he wants to tell her, but if he stumbles over the words in his head, he has no hope of speaking them aloud. Every day he hears an irate, drunken voice telling him he’s stupid and worthless. Every day, he does nothing to disprove the accusations.

When the professor hands back their first lab assignment, she gives them each a genuinely warm smile. “Outstanding work, Fitz, Simmons. I knew pairing you two up could produce fascinating, creative results. I’d love for you to continue with this project on your own if you have the time. Why don’t you drop by my office hours sometime this week?”

Fitz and Simmons both nod mutely, matching wide eyes and stunned expressions. It’s certainly not the first time their work has been praised, or even the first time a professor has wanted to mentor one or the other outside of class. But it’s the first time a partnership has yielded a better outcome than solo effort. Fitz suddenly remembers all the times he’d thought his work could benefit from Simmons’s expertise and now it has, almost without him noticing.

Maybe, he thinks, as their professor leaves them to consider her offer, it’s not too late for a friendship after all. Maybe together they really could be twice as smart.

He licks his lips and shoves his hands beneath the table to hide the shaking. “So,” he says, smiling bravely, “can you believe that work Professor Vaughn assigned?”

++

_ii. now_

Fitz doesn’t have the courage to talk to her, not to _really_ talk. At this point, he has spent over half his life confiding in someone who’s become his partner in every sense of the word. He can hardly remember what it felt like to be so afraid.

But now he has a monstrous guilt churning his stomach and squeezing his lungs. He has whispered confessions that should have been only for her, but she was never there. At the time he had thought he was the world’s biggest coward, but now he wishes, more than anything, that he had the courage of his youth. Or perhaps it was naiveté.

One night, months into their space confinement, Jemma turns to him and smiles. It’s sad but also gentle. Jemma has always had an almost unimaginable strength, but right now she has softened all her edges, as if she realizes Fitz is just one cut away from falling apart. He has already fallen apart, over and over and over again, but he appreciates her care all the same.

“Do you remember,” she asks, sitting next to him on their bed and leaning her head against his shoulder, “the first time you really spoke to me? After all those months of ignoring me and all you said was, ‘Can you believe that work Professor Vaughn assigned?’”

Fitz laughs sharply, so unaccustomed to a feeling of mirth that he shocks himself. He clears his throat. “Well. It wasn’t a particularly scintillating assignment.”

He can feel her smile, the side of her face pressed against his shirt. “That’s the first time I thought you might not hate me.”

Fitz tenses, pulling away to look at her and immediately regretting the loss of contact. “What? I never hated you!”

She rolls her eyes in the same way she’s rolled her eyes at him for years and years and it cracks his heart a little bit more. “You were constantly trying to one-up me! And the rest of the time you wouldn’t even speak to me.”

He doesn’t know what to say, reliving their first interactions and seeing it all from her perspective. Any other time, this kind of information would have made him laugh, but now it makes him a little queasy. “No,” he finally says, “I was just shy. I could never hate you.”

“What about now?” she whispers, and he glances at her in confusion. She picks at invisible lint on her trousers. “None of this would have happened if we hadn’t gone into the field in the first place. Do you hate me for that?”

“No,” he breathes out, incredulous. “No, of course not.”

“Why not?” Jemma’s voice, like her smile, is soft and sad. He wants, more than anything, to protect her. But this is where that desire has gotten them.

“How can I answer that?” he asks. “Maybe we would have died at the Academy when Hydra took over, who knows? And anyway, it was my choice to come with you. And I couldn’t...I could never hate you.” He turns away as he says this, not brave enough to tell her the real truth, which is: _I could never hate you because I’ve always loved you. I loved you until I didn’t, and I don’t know how to live with that betrayal_.

She places a hand to his heart and he worries she knows what he’s thinking anyway. “Then why don’t you believe me when I say the same thing?”

He sighs, leaning his head forward and rubbing a hand across his face. “Jemma, you deserve—”

“Fitz, stop,” she cuts him off. “Don’t tell me what I deserve. I know what I deserve and I know what I want. I just...I want us to talk again. I don’t know if that’s even possible and I don’t want to push you, but I miss you. I miss you so much.”

He looks at her and wonders how his heart can expand and shatter all at once. He opens his mouth and still, he cannot speak.

Jemma runs her fingers through his overgrown curls, and instinctively he melts into her touch. “I thought you hated me,” she says. “All those months I thought you were trying to belittle my ideas and prove you were smarter than me. I thought you found me annoying. And then you joked about Professor Vaughn’s assignment and it sounds so silly now, but somehow I just _knew_ we would be the best of friends. I was right, but I was also wrong, because you’re my best friend but you’re also so much more than that.” She presses a kiss against the throbbing of his temple, feathersoft and achingly shy. “And you always will be, Fitz. I promise.”

When she smiles at him, he sees their entire history written across her face, and it’s such a deeply tragic history. But it’s also the countless victories, the comfort, the breakthroughs, the lives they’ve saved together, the times they laughed so hard they cried, the shared holidays as if they were married at twenty, and above everything else a love he could never even have imagined at sixteen years old. A love he still can’t believe he found.

Maybe, he thinks, it’s not too late for them after all. Maybe together they really could be twice as strong. Maybe this unbearable weight that breaks him more each day would be a little bit lighter, if only he could tell her everything.

He licks his lips and shoves his hands beneath his thighs to hide the shaking. “So,” he says, smiling bravely, “can you believe that work Generic Guard Number Three assigned?”


End file.
